UPDATED 12:00 EDT / APRIL 12 2021

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AWS launches next phase of COVID-19 diagnostic tools with $20M, expanded scope

Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced the launch of the next phase of its Diagnostic Development Initiative to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic, which includes an expanded scope and $20 million of new funding.

During the first phase, AWS supported 87 organizations in 17 countries and awarded $8 million to support a range of diagnostic research and development projects.

Supported projects included molecular tests for antibodies, antigens and nucleic acids, diagnostic imaging, wearables and data analytics tools that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect the virus.

Starting today, AWS is expanding the scope into three new areas: early disease detection to identify outbreaks at the individual and community level, disease prognosis to better understand disease trajectory and public health genomics to get viral genome sequencing rolled out worldwide.

AWS intends to prioritize COVID-19 projects but also plans to focus on other infectious diseases.

“We have seen transformative innovations in how we diagnose disease over the past year, from machine learning-powered X-ray imagery analysis to new developments in rapid, high quality, and direct-to-consumer tests,” said Dr. Vin Gupta, chief medical officer of Amazon’s COVID-19 Response. “These changes will continue to evolve and improve our ability to respond to future outbreaks. We have already seen inspirational results from the Diagnostic Development Initiative.”

The projects supported by the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative may focus on COVID-19 and have an immediate impact on the pandemic, Amazon also says its work has far-reaching effects on medical diagnostics for other infectious diseases.

Examples of AWS projects that came out of the initiative included work with Stanford University School of Medicine, Illumina Inc. and Helix.

Stanford University School of Medicine’s Healthcare Innovation Lab developed a smartwatch app that can detect changes in resting heart rate and step count to detect early signs of COVID-19 infection. A pilot trial of the app successfully alerted newly infected individuals as quickly as 10 days before they became aware of any symptoms.

“We’re hopeful that ongoing screening using wearable devices can provide scalable diagnostics solutions to overcome current testing barriers,” said Michael Snyder, professor and chair of genetics for Stanford University’s School of Medicine. “And that expanding data access to a broader range of researchers will contribute to new discoveries that improve human health.

Illumina, an American biotechnology company, which makes a line of products for sequencing, genotyping and gene sequencing, released its SARS-CoV-2 Data Toolkit in April 2020. The toolkit includes a number of apps purpose-built to analyze COVID-19 samples its BaseSpace Sequence Hub, which runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

Amazon made these pipelines available to researchers at no cost for six months during 2020. During that time period, Illumina helped over 800 users process viral sequencing samples across its different apps.

Helix, a genomics startup, built its entire software platform on AWS and is now rapidly expanding its high-sensitivity molecular COVID-19 testing with next-day turnaround for employers and governments across the U.S. The company hopes to scale to process up to 100,000 COVID-19 tests per day in the U.S. making it one of the nation’s largest testing laboratories.

“Working with AWS has enabled us to not only stand up a COVID-19 solution in short order but also allowed Helix to scale quickly to meet a surge of testing demand this past winter,” said Jim Chou, vice president of engineering at Helix. “The impact of this is huge.”

Amazon will accept applications through the end of the year, with priority given to applications received before July 31. Interested parties can sign up on the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative portal.

Image: Pixabay

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